Politics and Culture

August 22, 2013

Dawkins-bashing

Some day someone will try and make sense of why, currently, the person of Richard Dawkins attracts so much vitriol. It's not just the religious right either, which you'd expect: it's almost worse from the liberal left. And, in my experience at any rate, it's not just online. Mention Dawkins in any social setting and inevitably the majority, to almost near unanimity, will be tripping over themselves to express their hatred of the man. Very likely someone will explain to you, with the air of voicing an opinion of startling originality, that militant atheism is just as bad as militant religion, or that really - don't you see? - atheism is itself like a religion. I've learnt to avoid the subject.

Dawkins is the sluggish pundit’s dream. It does not matter which paper you work for. Editors of all political persuasions and none will take an attack on Darwin’s representative on earth. With the predictability of the speaking clock, Owen Jones, the Peter Hitchens of the left, thinks the same as Craig Brown, Private Eye’s high Tory satirist. Tom Chivers, the Telegraph’s science blogger, says the same as Andrew Brown, the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent. The BBC refuses to run contrary views. It assures the nation that ‘militant’ atheism is as fanatical as militant religion — despite the fact that no admirer of The God Delusion has ever planted a bomb, or called for the murder of homosexuals, Jews and apostates.

Sharp operators could sell the same piece a dozen times without changing a word. Read the papers, and you will suspect that is exactly what sharp operators have done.

One day there will be a reckoning. One day, thousands who have suffered genital mutilation, religious threats and forced marriages will turn to the intellectual and political establishments of our day and ask why they did not protect them. The pathetic and discreditable reply can only be: ‘We were too busy fighting Richard Dawkins to offer you any support at all.’

Clazy, you are correct. What Dawkins has shown is that in the ideology of the European left, Islam operates like the King on a chessboard. Every single other piece - feminism, gay rights, social equality, freedom of speech, atheism, ecology, protection of the indigenous working class - must be ruthlessly sacrificed to protect it.

I much prefer Dawkins to the other new atheists. But what I don't understand is why they care so much about it. All religions except one are fairly harmless comforting superstitions, and as an answer to the question "why is there something and not nothing" it's as good as any. I just don't see that the world would be better off without religion, except one.